As I lay in bed on the eve of All Hallows Eve, my mind drifted off, my senses took their leave; far away from the chill of the great northern plains, to sunny Silicon Valley, where the warmth never wanes. When in my reverie, much to my delight, I envisioned a festive gathering of tech luminaries on Halloween night...
I started to work with an interesting new client named Count Dracula. He wanted to start a new company focused on anti-aging solutions. (He thought Los Angeles would be the perfect place to start.) He needed some social selling help, so together we put together a great LinkedIn profile and I’d like to share a few highlights with you.
Google’s head of social, Vic Gundotra, announced some very big growth in user metrics that could make many believe that Google+ might be knocking on Facebook’s door soon. Well, technically the growth in user metrics is probably accurate; however, a great big fat asterisk belongs at the end of that new statistic.
By a show of hands, how many of you think about the economy, how it affects your job, and a plan B should things go south again? Earlier this week, I had lunch with our banker and I asked him his opinion on all of this. He said something really interesting is happening – something that has never happened in his career: People aren’t borrowing money.
We live in a scary time. Decision-makers are under pressure and short on patience. In a word, they’re easily spooked. They look for reasons to run away—or to avoid salespeople in the first place. Put these five tips into practice and assure your prospects they’ve got nothing to fear.
Ranking well in local search results is one of the most important things a small business can do to succeed in today’s fast-paced mobile market. In this article, we’re going to explore all the steps we take when optimizing our clients’ sites for local search.
Google recently limited the search data available to you and the archiving capability for the data you can have. It appears that this is simply a function of increased security and privacy measures in this time of hyper-awareness of the threat of intrusion into our online behavior. However, it may not be that straightforward.
In the information age, operational efficiency is not a key competitive advantage; in fact, it is directly tied to rigidity and inability to adapt to change, which are a huge disadvantage in the new global, connected economy. Flexibility, agility and adaptability are the new competitive advantage.
The perceived value of the halloween candy, gathered through much trouble for a quite little reward, is way higher than its price on the shelves of Wal-Mart. Why is that? Part of the value of the Halloween candy lies in the fun of gathering it, spending time going from door to door with friends, soon to be rewarded by a small but very valued piece of chocolate.
They may not be pretty, but there's a lot we can learn from our undead friends. Learn how you can put 7 of the best habits of zombies to work for you today. Nobody puts the undead in a corner. Zombies fight for what they want – and usually always get it – because nothing, and I mean nothing, can shake their confidence.
In what can only best be described as Social Media McCarthyism, Twitter is quietly engaging in a modern-day witch hunt, whereby user accounts are being indiscriminately purged, sometimes within days of creation, and seemingly in violation of the social media giant’s accepted practices.
While we all seem to rush to complete school so we can settle into our jobs, thinking we’ve ‘made it’, learning just doesn’t end there. Or it shouldn’t. In fact, if you want to be successful in your career you need to be learning constantly, particularly given your involvement in the ever-changing industry of social media.
Last night when I logged in to post some stuff I noticed at the top of my Google Plus page that for both the brand pages that I manage and my personal profile, all qualified as “preapproved for the Google plus custom URL” Oooh, how exciting! I’ve been spending more and more time on Google Plus lately after listening to Guy Kawasaki.
One of the biggest challenges nonprofits have is finding content that will resonate with their community. A little known, but powerful way to curate content is with Facebook Interests lists. Interest Lists, if you don’t know, are lists of pages (or people) that Facebook users can create and access from their sidebar.
B2B marketers can learn a lot from a pop star, in this case Justin Timberlake. "Justin and his team have executed a new marketing playbook that has changed the way brands are developed and products are released in the connected and digital age. We’ll call it the 20/20 model… at least until the 'cease and desist' letters arrive."
When I meet with Financial Advisors to discuss their online strategy and use of social media the conversation nearly always turns to the advisor’s skepticism about generating business from social media. Everyone is also concerned about compliance issues, and rightly so. But, with a solid strategy in place, you can handle compliance issues.
Has Google rocked the boat again? In the last two months they rolled out a new algorithm update called Hummingbird and they stopped providing valuable keyword data in Google Analytics. In this post. I’ll tell you about how your SEO strategy needs to adapt to the new algorithm and some clever ways you can still get relevant keyword information.
Chris Brogan and Julien Smith in their best selling book "Trust Agents" focused on the importance of trust in social media. They defined a trust agent as someone who people look to for advice. Someone who has significant influence and reputation that people trust.
The study reports that Facebook’s ad clicks, ad impressions and advertisers’ return on investment were all higher in 2013 than 2012. Facebook ads were clicked 29% more often in 2013, and the ROI was 58% higher than 2012. The drop in CPC’s means that Facebook is becoming a cheaper and potentially effective channel for marketers.
Yesterday, Twitter again announced further changes to its platform that will change the way in which customers and brands interact. Their most recent announcement states that any Tweet that contains an attached image will automatically display a preview of the image directly in the user’s timeline.
Google+ announced a new set of photo features at an event this morning in San Francisco that contain new functionality and compete directly with many Apple products such as iPhoto and iMovie. These new features are in addition to the photo center redesign from the I/O event in May of this year.
At NowThis News, 15-second news segments are the norm. Primarily using Instagram video, NowThis News targets the younger generation by relaying the news through social media as well as an app. Has traditional media given up on young people? And even more importantly, have young people given up on traditional media?
As we all know, Pinterest is an amazing place to find new ideas for seemingly every holiday - and Halloween is no exception. This year, we used our soon-to-be-revealed keyword listening tool to pull a sample of 20,000 pins and found 100 of the most popular words on Pinterest for this Halloween.
A great way to build credibility online is by blogging, which helps people and businesses reach their audience and display their expertise and skills. But credibility isn’t something that can be attained instantly. As with everything, certain factors play a key role in making a blog trustworthy.
For those of us who have worked in and around corporate environments, it’s not uncommon to hear shareholder centric comments like “the shareholders aren’t happy” or “what will our shareholders think?” But if there is too much emphasis on the stockholder and not enough emphasis on customers, it is inevitably a losing strategy.
